I close my eyes and what comes to me is Volver, sung by my mother when I was a child, her guitar in hand on one of those evenings when family or friends would gather.

Volver,
con la frente marchita,
las nieves del tiempo
platearon mi sien.
Sentir,
que es un soplo la vida,
que veinte años no es nada,
que febril la mirada,
errante en las sombras
te busca y te nombra.
Vivir,
con el alma aferrada
a un dulce recuerdo
que lloro otra vez.

(Literally: To return with a withered brow, the snows of time have silvered my temples. To feel that life is a breath, that twenty years is nothing, that a feverish gaze, wandering in the shadows, searches for you and calls your name. To live with the soul clinging to a sweet memory that makes me weep again.)

In what felt like the blink of an eye, my mother and father decided to move to Bangkok and join my Asian adventure, which had begun two years earlier, so they could start one of their own.

As tends to happen, the plans didn't unfold the way they'd been drawn up, and after a year and a half they returned to Mexico. My wife and I followed them a few years later, and we continued the adventure together for nearly six years before going back to Thailand to build a farm.

They stayed in Mexico.

My father died unexpectedly in the middle of 2024, just before he would have turned seventy.

My mother then decided to accept our invitation and set out once more for Southeast Asia, except that this time I was no longer in Thailand but in Cambodia, and she was coming not only to see me but to share experiences with her five-year-old granddaughter.

A couple of years have passed. The other day I found the blog Aventuras en Asia gathering dust, unrecoverable, because the Google account my father used is still linked to a phone number nobody answers anymore, and the recovery code never arrives.

So I decided to pull all the old posts, with all their comments, and hand this blog over to my mother so she can tell the story of her next adventures. Her other half is no longer here, the one who would sit with her and talk until something worth writing would emerge from the conversation. Now it falls to her alone.

And so life passes, that brief breath.

We keep sailing. I'll say goodbye the way she signed off every post: with a word that most likely made its way into Thai from Khmer, the language we still hear all around us here in Cambodia every day. It's hard to translate, but it means something like: may your path be light.

Sanuk. Saranuk in Khmer.